Time invested vs. time spent

Posted on 10/04/2013

Working for an hourly rate, doing a task, or exchanging your time for money, is time spent. You can never get it back.

Unsuccessful people spend most, if not all their time ‘spending’ time. Leveraging, leading, inspiring, influencing, managing, outsourcing, networking, training and building systems are all examples of time ‘invested.’ Time invested continues to earn or leverage long after that task was completed.

Buying a property in time invested [and money invested]. Become aware of where you are spending all of your time in one of the 2 areas above, spend less time, and invest more of it. Passive income comes from time invested. Dividends come from time invested. Salaries come from time spent.

There’s nothing wrong with exchanging time for money. When you package deals, you can earn a lot of money pre deal or per hour. That can get you on the road to being wealthy.

It serves its purpose. But you’ll never be time wealthy unless you invest time for residual returns.

When you’re busy, perhaps the first thing you think is ‘what do I need to do?

Or ‘I’ve got so much to do, where do I start? Well try this: Next time you start your task or to do list, instead of starting with a task, start with what you can leverage or outsource.

Who can you get to do the first task you were going to do. And the second, and third. Out of 7 tasks for the day, if you leveraged 4 of them, and you do 3 of them, you’ll achieve more than double the results in less than half of the time.

Once you have leveraged out tasks you would ordinarily have done yourself, they don’t just magically arrive on your desk the next day in shiny wrapping paper. Any task ‘leveraged,’ needs managing through to completion [time invested].

Check through your leveraged tasks and manage them accordingly, and only once you have gone through these 2 steps should you consider ‘doing’ a task [time spent]. A few small hours moved from doing to leveraging, from time spent to time invested has huge compounded benefits.

And if you’re too busy to invest time, that’s probably the very reason you need to do it. And if no one can do that task or job as well as you, that’s probably the very reason you need to do it too.

Leverage: Taking the smallest action that will yield the largest result.

15 Responses to Time invested vs. time spent

I really find that having chunks of super productive time where i can bash through a project and have clear and linear thought very effective. Smaller less mind intensive tasks such as email etc are better done afterwards rather than before or during big brain hungry tasks.

If I have a mountain of tasks to complete, it feels exhausting just thinking about them. To plan the tasks and delegate as many as possible brings a feeling of control and renewed energy. Leverage is an art that wasn’t taught when I was at school……. perhaps it needs to be?
An excellent article.

Here’s an extract from our new book, “Multiple Streams of Property Income,” – I hope this helps:

“Don’t be too busy to be rich: too busy means poor. Too busy means zero leverage. Too busy means head-down-doing, and no Captain can steer a ship with his head down. Don’t be too busy doing, so that you can ‘earn’ the time to do the things you love, but forever be too busy doing, so that you never end up doing the things you love.

Most people live their whole lives like that, and then die. Make the decision and change NOW my friend.

Calculating your IGA: the first stage is to calculate your Income Generating Value [IGV]. When you know exactly what an hour of your time is worth, you can calculate accurately what tasks you should do yourself, and what tasks you should leverage out, pay for, or inspire others to do for you.

Taking a step back though, the following exercise is important. This is a book of action, not just a book of hypothesis, so are you prepared to take some action?

“When all is said and done, more is said than done”

Good, then let’s begin:

For the next 2 weeks create a simple work log of how you are spending your work time [career and/or property]. Have a simple word document open or a sheet of paper or notes folder on your smart phone. Every hour that you work in a day, note briefly what you did. Be honest with yourself, and at the end of the day put the letters IGA next to the parts that were income generating.

At the end of the 2 weeks, work out what percentage of your time is spent on IGA’s. If you’re anything like me, you may be [positively] shocked at how just a few hours bring in most of the money and results, and a huge amount of time is virtually wasted, with little or no financial benefit.

Now, to calculate your IGV [income generating value], total the amount of hours you spend working every week. That includes your job/career, any part time work, and any time you’re putting into property or asset building – the entire amount of time attributed to earning money. You might have something like 55 hours.

Now calculate, or roughly guess, how much money you earn in that timeframe. If you find it easier, calculate the same figures: hours worked and income generated, in a month, it doesn’t matter as long as there is consistency. You may have £850 in a week. Make sure that all income that is not a loan is added, any asset or passive income should be included.

Now divide the amount of income by the amount of hours, and you have your IGV – your time value per hour. Every hour you work brings in, on average, £x.

Now you have to be strict with yourself, and have faith in this algorithm. OK, it’s not that fancy, but still you should be disciplined: any task that comes your way that you feel will or could earn you more than your IGV, then do it yourself, because it will pay you to do it. If you keep doing that, your IGV will go up and up and up.

But even more importantly, every task that comes your way that will or could bring in less than your IGV, you must leverage or outsource it. Either blag a favour, do a reciprocal deal, or pay for the task to be done. If you don’t, you’ll get poorer and you’ll actually repel more money that you pull in. We promise you this – stick to this and it will change your life forever.

“What you earn has nothing to do with what you’re doing, and everything to do with what you’re not doing” – Rob Moore

It’s not what you are doing that is bringing in money; it’s all the things you are not doing that could be bringing in much much more. You’re probably working far too hard to be rich. The things you are doing are probably blocking what you could be doing that earns all the income.”

Leveraging – transferable skills in life as a whole. It works in a work environment and it works at home. Instructions given with a smile and total support where needed help empower others to achieve as well ; so its win-win and you get more time to make more money – simple !

It’s the last stages of finalization at present, and it will be available towards the end of May (just in time for summer reading!).

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But you need some power to be able to leverage. Either the power of money or the power of status. I spent a long time being unemployed and it has taken a whole year working to pay off debts and start to repair my credit rating. Some time later this year I hope that my credit rating will no longer be classed as poor, but fair. Then I can start leveraging money. I know this can be done thro property but at the moment I could bearly pay for solicitors fees or get a full valuation done. I don’t want to get 3/4′s of the way thro a property deal and then find I can’t finance it. I need to feel secure in the nowledge that , if required, I can call on a loan if needed. I know that there are ways and means to get these things done but when you are starting off I think it is more difficult than when you have already done a deal or two, and have gained some power (experience) of how things are done. I sometimes wonder if people just forget how difficult it can be at the starting line, once they have got well into the race. I do get the principle of leverage. I’m just not sure I have enough power to exercise leverage.